Sartre Nothingness Quotes & Sayings

Nothingness haunts Being. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Lucien thought with bitter pleasure that his parents found him looking fine. "I don't exist." He closed his eyes and let himself drift: existence is an illusion because I know I don t exist, all I have to do is plug my ears and not think about anything and I'll become nothingness. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I love you enormously. I'm spending a little time away from you - quite absurd and contingent. I would so like to see you, my stubborn little thing, and tell you my stories and hold your hand. You are my love, you good little being. Far from you I measure the nothingness of the flesh, and I am not having much fun. — Jean-Paul Sartre

This happened not once, but twice - first with Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, and then with his pupil Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (We discuss Sartre in the next section.) — Christopher Panza

Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can't read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don't retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, "I get it." Then I put them back on the shelf. — Marc Maron

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think ... and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being. — Jerry Hall

The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Movements never quite exist, they are passages, intermediaries between two existences, moments of weakness, I expected to see them come out of nothingness, progressively ripen, blossom: I was finally going to surprise beings in the process of being born. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I'd dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing. — Michael Gira

Being and Nothingness by Sartre. — E. Lockhart

How can you expect my character to be solidly real, to be anything other than obviously imaginary, when everything is contingent anyway? My Character has been deformed out of reality by his own nihilism, his own metaphysical nothingness. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. the true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them ... there is nothing. — Jean-Paul Sartre